Fine Art Magazine • Spring 2011 • 61

Esther Anderson –Burnin’ with Bob, 1973

BOB MARLEY The Making of The Legend, a film by Esther Anderson & Gian Godoy, takes you on a journey that reveals the stories behind some of the lyrics of his songs that became iconic anthems for his generation and many generations to come, like Get Up, Stand Up and

I Shot the Sheriff. The house Esther and Bob built together as a refuge and retreat away from the pressures of stardom where many iconic songs were written; The places they visited across Jamaica for the first time when ideas, images, sounds and metaphors became part of his world and ended up as lyrics in his songs. Witnesses who met Marley stimulated him to write more songs about their plight and pain. But also on this journey you will discover with him beautiful Jamaica, its mountains and rivers—Columbus called it Island of Springs; The British legacy in architecture, botany and horticultural splendor kept by the Colonials. The culture of music and dance and the gift of oral storytelling handed down from the times of Aesop and Bra Anansi and Bre’r Rabbit. And the impact the music made on the country and its people. By the time of his early death in 1980, he had become a legendary global figure and remains so to this day.

Esther Anderson, auto-photographed herself and Bob Marley in Trindad for Carnival, 1973

Wi thout doubt, Robert Nesta (Bob) Marley, Peter Macintosh, and Neville (Bunny Wailer)

Livingstone—collectively known as The Wailers—were every bit as important in our modern musical history as any band, including The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Dion and The Belmonts, Muddy Waters Blues Band…you get the idea. The three principals each possessed lovely voices, great songwriting skills, and a collective social and spiritual consciousness the likes of which had never been exposed on the international scene. Their first album for Island Records, Catch A Fire produced classic staples like Concrete Jungle, Stop That Train, Kinky Reggae, etc. A self-contained ensemble, the Wailers were propelled by the Barrett Brothers on drums and bass and Wire Lindo on keyboards. Their follow up album, also released in 1973, put them on the cusp of the big-time, “bubbling under the top one-hundred.” International acclaim would soon arrive with “I Shot The Sheriff” but it was via Eric Clapton’s version. At this point, internal strife caused the band to splinter off—to the benefit of all—as Marley became famous and Wailer and Tosh produced their own stellar bodies of work.

In the midst of this mix of powerful and gifted men was Esther Anderson—a star in her own right, at the time, bigger than them.

—VICTOR FORBES

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Born in the Parish of St. Mary’s, Jamaica, Esther Anderson studied drama at the Actor’s Studio in London and played

roles in movies—Henry Levin’s “Genghis Khan for Columbia Pictures, Robert Freeman’s The Touchables for Twentieth Century Fox, Ted Kotcheff ’s Two Gentlemen Sharing”, Jerry Lewis’s One More Time for United Artists, and Sidney Poitier’s A Warm December for First Artists. This role of an African princess won her an NAACP Image Award for Best Actress in 1973. Her film Short Ends was selected by Linda Myles for the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1976. Her latest film was The Three Dumas, about the French writer Alexander Dumas and his African ancestors. It was premiered in London as part of the com-memoration of the 200 years of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 2007. It also premiered in Canada, France and the US in 2008. She did it in collaboration with Gian Godoy in Paris, with Maria Schneider as the mother of Dumas, and the voice of his Haitian grandmother.

Esther helped to develop the then-fledgling Jamaican music label, Island Records, from the early 1960s, promoting and managing Jamaican artists like Millie Small, Jimmy Cliff, and Bob Marley and the Wailers. Her iconic photographs of Bob Marley and their lyrical collaboration launched his international career in 1973 with the groundbreaking albums Catch a Fire, Burnin’, and Natty Dread. Following are Ms. Anderson’s reminiscences of those historic days.

I started taking pictures some forty years ago. My first images were of Marlon Brando, which were shot between 1966 and 1968 with a Kodak Brownie Instamatic. But my first professional assignment as stills photographer was for Lord Puttnam, producer of The Pied Piper of Hamlin and directed by Jacques Demy in Germany.

During the sixties, photographers like Avedon, Hiro, Jerry Shatzberg (who did the Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde album cover) and Robert Freeman (photographer of the Beatles revolution) used photography as one of the several means of artistic expression available to them. Whether it was to document events and performances or to break all so-called pre-written rules of photography in creating images in order to bring about unconventional works. From them I learnt that a ‘close up’ ‘BLOWN UP’ to the large photographic image format becomes pictorial art.

Each of my shots of Bob Marley was created as an original work in 1973. Then I began to

think about the way of exhibiting the pictures, and to analyse the context in which they were to appear. The result was the use of the large format for the front and back of the Burnin’ and Catch A Fire album covers, and for the inside sleeve of Burnin’ a mixture of free and applied photography, portraying a ‘never before seen’ group of people

living on the edge of society—the Rastafarians of Jamaica. In essence, these pictures/photo journalism uncovered hundreds of years of a forgotten people and their culture

From a comparative viewpoint, I call it contemporary photography; depicting a different perception of a people’s everyday surroundings. I wanted to show this slight displaced view of things in familiar guise, although at the same time, new. Their presentation and the conditions associated to the threat of their existence, their vulnerability, but also their uniqueness is captured in a subtle but realistic way.

The images show the Rastafarians and Bob Marley not in an “Island in the Sun” tropical tourist setting, but in a harsh human-shaped environment. I wanted to compile a social picture during Michael Manley’s PNP government by means of portrait pictures of the selected individual artists. I therefore concentrated on the single picture, showing the musicians and the Rastafarians with a sociological interest behind the pictures. Whilst the colours in the pictures are always harmonious, these are not so much psychological portraits, but rather carefully staged shots in which Bob Marley and the Rastafarian people present themselves. These pictures are

given their interest by the formulation of formal and contextual contradictions. The background and architecture chosen to reflect the urban appearance of a community in downtown Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, lends the rather surrealistic settings a concrete political context.

My concern was to make clear that these photographs are products of a construction of authenticity. I wanted to show an image of the world, and at the same time discover my own individual picture world.

And so I joined the great family of photographers thanks to Jerry Shatzberg, photographer/filmmaker winner of the Palm d’Or at Cannes who clued me into the power of the ‘close up’; Richard Avedon who taught me how to keep focus and concentrate as I watched him work in his studio, and Robert ‘Bob’ Freeman who studied architecture at Cambridge University but ended up as a photographer and filmmaker, and took me under his wings and taught me many things about lighting and framing. Photography became my shield, and a means of resistance—a way of affirming my view of the world.

The first photographic sessions for the Burnin’ and Catch A Fire album covers were done at 56 Hope Road, Kingston, Jamaica at the end of February and beginning of March, 1973.

The second session was done at Hellshire Beach outside Kingston with Countryman, an Indian Rasta fisherman and his family. The third session was done in Trenchtown, home of Reggae music. The fourth session was done at Bull Bay, east of Kingston with the Rastafarian Bongo Macky in another type of Rasta fishing community

1st SHOOTFor the first session, I choose 56 Hope Road

because Island Records had bought the premises and it had a large garden with ancient mango trees that the leader of the group, Bob Marley, loved to sit under and cool out from the heat; to smoke and reason about philosophy and the Rastafarian way of life. It was there that I took the first ‘closeup’ of Bob smoking his ‘spliff ’, as he called it. It was a natural shot to make the point that smoking was part of their culture. I posed him with his shirt off, because I liked the way the sunlight reflected on the golden tone of his skin and bounced back into my lens. I used a

Fixing a flat on the way to Hellshire Beach

Marlon Brando, Palm Springs

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Hellshire Beach, 1973, outside Kingston

all images © Esther Anderson, used by permission

Fine Art Magazine • Spring 2011 • 63

Nikon with a 200mm telephoto zoom lens and Ektachrome transparency with 400 ASA speed. But I used the telephoto lens like a close-up lens for the high contrast and grainy quality I wanted in the shot. There was no make-up, no hairdresser or stylist, just myself, Bob and the camera. The aperture was set at F22 to ensure depth of focus, and the effect of the telephoto was to compress the image into a tight shot. He had to fit into the square format of the album cover. These first shots were done early in the day, before the sun got too hot, when Bob and the other musicians would take refuge under the mango trees.

2nd SHOOTOn my arrival in Jamaica, I met an Indian

Rasta fisherman called Countryman. He lived in a shack outside of Kingston on a beautiful beach call Hellshire. He said he hated Babylon so much he had built his house and turned his back on Kingston. I was fascinated by his rhetoric. I wanted to photograph Bob with him, as their philosophy and take on the world were the same. After we finished the shoot at Hope Road, we got a taxi and left for Hellshire to continue the session. On our way, the taxi had a punctured tire and Bob got out and helped the driver fix it. I took shots of him as I was impressed. Not many rock stars would bother. We arrived just before sunset.

Countryman was there to greet us and I introduced Bob to him. They talked while I photographed them together. The session continued until sunset and the light had disappeared. I made Bob run on the beach without his shirt again, using a wide angle lens and film from my Ektachrome transparency stock with the same speed 400ASA, the same Nikon equipment with the 200mm lens and the wide angle lens with the aperture completely open and without a tripod. I had to make sure to keep the camera steady, using my body as the tripod. I used the wide angle for the shots of Bob running on the beach and the 200mm lens for the ‘close-ups’ which created a soft focus and gave the pictures an atmospheric background. I got the wide angle shot I wanted, to give the feeling of space and freedom, although he ran in his boots. I posed him beside the Rasta Shorty’s canoe which was painted red green and gold like the tam he wore on his head which he called his ‘covenant.’ It was during this session that I got the idea to use the colours of Rasta in their promotion and that

Reasoning with Countryman, Hellshire Beach

the lyrics should be written on the record sleeve in red green and gold. I suggested these points to my colleague Chris (Blackwell, head of Island Records) to whom I spoke before sending the transparencies to him in London. When I finished the shoot I had the rolls developed at Spencer Colour Lab in Kingston. I selected the best and sent them to London. Graphically, Burnin’ was the most successful Wailers cover, the lettering specially designed to express the title with the Wailers, a collage of six faces that would become well known by the end of that year, 1973.

3rd SHOOTThe 3rd shoot was done

photo-journalism style in Trench Town because that is where the music originated. Bob also had a record shop called the ‘Wailing Wailers Shack’ down there. When I arrived, Bunny Livingston, one of the Wailers and the footballer Alan Skill Cole was standing in front of the shop. I took shots of them without their knowledge. Although shots were taken of the interior of Bob’s record shop, they were not used on the cover. The Nikon camera, with the wide angle lens, was used for most of the shots. I used Ektachrome transparency 200 ASA this time for the blueish tint I wanted from the morning light. Bunny looked marvelous in his Rasta colors, although at that time I knew him least of all the Wailers and was reluctant to ask him to pose for me as he was a very volatile person, so I took the individual shots without his knowledge. But when the Burnin’ album came out, I had to pay everyone on the cover for the use of their images. I was never compensated by the record company or Bob.

The shot of the two boys pushing their cart named ‘Little David’ was typical of the hard working youth in the ghetto. And it was one of the last shots I did as we drove away from Trenchtown almost at midday. The shot of the façade of a record shop painted blue and red on the Kingston Parade with a statue of Queen Victoria in the Park behind was typical of the crowded

Parade where people left on buses going to all parts of the Island.

4th SHOOTThe 4th Shoot was done at Bull Bay, east

of Kingston. I chose this location because I had met Bongo Macky who lived next door to Bunny Livingston, the difficult member of the group. Bull Bay was a community of Rastafarians of African

descent and their families living on the edge of society. At first I used the telephoto zoom lens with Ektachrome 400 ASA with the aperture open at 16, and the first shots were done as photo-journalism. But the children were happy to pose for me. Their father, Bongo Macky, a fisherman and small farmer, was from St. Mary, the same Parish I came from so it was easy for me. He was happy to share his views with me about the PNP Government of Michael Manley and his Rastafarian Philosophy. He posed happily with his pet

goat, smoking his chalice, and with his daughter Bugus who was the first Rasta child the world saw with her dreadlocks when Burnin’ was released, and his son standing on his head with his dreadlocks hanging down was printed upside down for a surreal reality. The group shot with Bugus and her sisters was the first picture taken after they had returned from a sea bath and were washing themselves with fresh water from a tin tub. Looking on at the scene and smiling at me was a handsome Rasta sitting under a guango tree, who looked rather like Bob. I took a shot of him and was told he was called ‘ITAL’ for natural, a football player with the ‘House of Dread’ and friend of Bongo Macky and the children of Bull Bay.

On set with Sidney Poitier The Wailers, Prince Albert Bridge, Chelsea, 1973

BOB MARLEY, The Making of The Legend, a film by Esther Anderson & Gian Godoy (r) is scheduled to premiere Autumn, 2011 at the African Odyssey programme of the British Film Institute, Southbank London. Vis i t http: / /rastaleaks.wordpress.com

Iconic Catch A Fire album cover

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